Ian Shine

As has been said many times before, people these days are living faster. Everything is about speed: journeys are faster; computers are faster; TV news is faster. We can have everything now and we bloody well want it now, including the problems that life is always ready to throw in our faces. And so we have invented the quarter life crisis. Fundamentally, it’s the mid-life crisis of the 21st century, which in itself was the 20th century’s sassier alternative to the 19th’s end-of-life crisis, which mostly entailed worrying about cobbling together enough cash to receive a proper burial, while still making sure that your plot in the graveyard has as good a view of the church steeple as your fellow deceased.

The mid-life crisis is, or was, essentially yuppie bravado that involved men in their late forties buying big red cars and having affairs with women ten years their junior. In a nutshell, it was for wankers.
The quarter-life crisis is much more the kind of thing that might end up in a Woody Allen movie – it’s all about internal strife and endless pontificating over your place in the world, and it all starts when you enter into the wonderful world of work.

Here’s the scenario. You come out of uni with your 2.1 ready to take on the world, only to find that the kind of jobs you now want require several years’ experience and that you’re more likely to end up working in Virgin Megastore or typing reports with names like ‘Admin1’. Even your most recent application got stonewalled. Why can’t you be Assistant Director of Children’s Programming at the BBC? You’ve watched CBBC religiously for the last 17 years and have even got a Going Live t-shirt – which, incidentally, all your student mates think is wicked. You’ve got Wacky Races on DVD and once directed your own version of the show using Happy Meal toys and your dad’s old camcorder.

Why can’t you be Assistant Director of Children’s Programming at the BBC? Because you’re an idiot.

Up to now you’ve been wrapped up in cotton wool. As a child you would draw pictures that would look like vomit on paper, yet have your parents decorate your kitchen with them and tell their friends how much potential they show. At school you’d come fourth in some competition or other and get a giant pat on the back and extra pocket money. Now you’ve got your 2.1 and your groundbreaking dissertation yet people think you’re shit and don’t even want you around their offices long enough to have an interview.

The message is for the first time in your life being pronounced loudly and clearly: YOU STINK!!
And to top things off there are those relatively few successful youngsters who are there seemingly just to heap more pain on the rest of us. When you start to realise that you’re too old to get in the England football team, when novelists appear who are younger than you, when it turns out that actresses you’ve vigorously tossed off over in your lonely bed could get you in trouble with the law if your dreams became reality, you’re inevitably going to feel like you’ve missed the boat.

So how is your ego supposed to handle this enormous blow? Just like you came to terms with Santa Claus being pure fabrication and Blue Peter not catering to your interests any longer. By finding a different reality to inhabit.

Many people take gap years, some go back to uni to do vocational degrees – others hook up with a rich old person and sacrifice a few years of their dignity for flaccid sex and wads of interest. Whichever of these routes you choose, the tidings are good. In fact, as long as you choose to steer yourself away from the world of work, you’re onto a winner.

Just look at the statistics. Today, life expectancy is 82 for a British male and 85 for a female, which is a damn sight better than the 48 and 50 you would’ve been onto the end of had you been born in 1900. Why the rise, we may be inclined to ask? Because of living conditions; because of health and hygiene? Nope. Because of the age that we start working.

Today, most people become slaves to the wage in their early 20s after bagging their special pieces of paper from former polytechnics. 100 years ago, kids would be off to work aged ten. In both cases, the age we can expect to die is approximately four times the age we start work, and thus the longer we can put off working, the longer we can expect to live and to stave off our quarter life crises.

Why are there so many ancient professors? Why is life-expectancy in the third-world and the sweatshop capitals of the world so much lower than in the western world? Because of the ages that these people start working.

The kids in India are having their quarter life crises at 12, reading Salinger and toiling away making Gap clothes trying to raise enough to go Inter-Railing for a month in the summer, while their western counterparts are hanging around with nothing better to do than check whether their first pubes have sprouted and push shopping trolleys into rivers. Why do the working classes tend to have kids younger? Because they’re going through their quarter life crisis and are searching for a means of justifying their existence, which the 20-something middle class kids can do by starting an MA in Applications of Photography on Cafe Walls or by travelling.

As for the rest of us, we can just go and label up the latest “2 for 10 pounds” promotion or have that file logged by 5 o’clock.


Ian Shine lives in the middle of Russia and spends much of his time wishing he still lived in Poland. He writes in dribs and drabs.

Tom Siggins

Illustration by Linda de Canha

The front door opens, slams. You turn your black, coarsely-haired head and she is standing there looking sophisticated, young, and beautiful. There is a man behind her; he looks tall, well-bred and strong. He is wearing a tailored suit. She walks into the sitting room, followed by the tall, bespoke man. You go to follow her, but everything around you distorts and changes. Perception is muddied, immersed in unclear water; you can see a bubbling froth hitting the shore line of smooth, white porcelain. Your transparent insect like wings are covered in layers of grease; realization hits. You know what you are, where you are, you are alone in the washing up bowl, with the dirty water and detritus. Insect legs attempt to clamber aboard a plate emerged in the bowl, out of the water, but you are powerless, impotent; still covered in so much grease. Razor sharp teeth thrust out of the water. The kitchen knife jaws slice, they cut. You can almost feel and sense them about to pierce you below, through the abdomen, between your scuttling legs…

You wake up. The dream is disturbing. You never remember your dreams, but this was so clear, so lucid. It’s lunchtime, feelings of numbness pang in your stomach, and you feel strangely tired, almost atrophic from a gluttony of sleep. When you eventually drifted into a half sleep last night you had left the TV on standby -symbolic of your life, on standby, in some sort of red dot limbo.

Thoughts dissipate, the TV is on, flicking through the channels, creating a montage of fractured dialogue. You rest on a channel-five quiz show; the female presenter is blonde and beautiful – she reminds you of her. You’re mildly titillated by her orthodontic, wholesome smile, but no response from your prick occurs. Life changes: sometimes fast, sometimes immeasurably slow. Life now in this instant has become like a prosaic TV quiz you no longer have interest in, you have no care for the trivial questions. You’ve lost all recognition for the cash prize and cuddly toy. At the tender age of twenty five, you lay in crisis. If your life was a show it would certainly be scheduled between the morally bankrupt chat show and a program that sells bits of antique tat. You let go of your cock. You have even made an enemy of your penis – it’s too depressed, too deflated to perform.

You can hear an old man outside your door in a towel dressing gown, pottering about. You know he is old, in a gown, because he is your Father. You returned home a long week ago. You went back to the London flat, packed up the last of your things and returned to your Father’s house, your old home. You drove away in your higher purchase car, driving out of the cold, congested, cruel City streets along the malignant motorway and you finally found yourself spat violently back into your hometown of stale, bitter-sweet memories.

You hadn’t been that way for perhaps over two years. It has become a uniformed and ugly town; a citadel for blandness. Pubs dotted on every corner; driving through you could see more and more looked to have sprouted up all over; like a pubescent boy with bad acne, bars and clubs erupting and spreading over the face of the entire townscape. For some reason, perhaps misplaced nostalgia you had navigated slowly through the newly paved and littered streets, following the snaking, and constricting concrete and glass python that is the new shopping centre. You arrived at a roundabout; one of the new buildings appeared reminiscent of a large fort-like garrison, JRR Tolkien’s Helms Deep. You couldn’t help but to stare out the window and picture orcs, chavs and drunkards being released on a Friday night from the countless bars. You imagine them being corralled and channeled by Police to this point, the cavorters and revelers crashing like a wave onto the mighty concrete walls and glass plated windows.
You arrived home; you had parked the car, shook your Father by the hand, both of you unsure whether a hug was too much, and unpacked your things. You were back home; back in the wilderness of suburbia.

Now you lay here, having quit your job, relationship, quit your shinier life in the nightmarish dreamscape that was and is the big smoke. Thoughts swim, wondering replaces doing, what next, what is it all about, what awaits… Must regroup and head back to the City, back to being a young professional, back to urban body combat, back to buying to let, back to the merry go round of sexually paranoid physical relationships, back to visceral smoke free bars and smoke full streets… must you?
You don’t know. You are in crisis. You are dancing on quicksand…

…All that floats through your mind is her face, her soft body, her fucking that prick behind your back. Numbness prevails, and nothing makes sense. You lay back in the womb like splendor of your old single bed with BMX racer duvet. A phone beeps.

‘I heard about the break and that you’re back home, sorry mate; but listen don’t get stuck to the fly paper that is Romford, see you soon as!’

You will reply. You will get out of bed. You will look to avoid the flypaper. Just not yet, just not now, just sleep, just sleep.

J Capeling

Despite raging obesity, cheap drugs and discounted supermarket-brand booze, the average lifespan has continually risen to the mid-eighties.

30,000 days, on average.

It is universally accepted that come day 15,000ish, you’ll get a mistress, re-mortgage the house, buy yourself a convertible Aston Martin… and subsequently get divorced.

It’s what you do. It’s your mid-life crisis.

It’s when you feel irreversibly aged and unsightly: too old to attract sexual attention, make a career change or learn new tricks. It’s when you realise that you’ve wasted your entire life nurturing your ungrateful spawn. So you befriend and emulate the behaviour of your children’s mates. You buy a flashy car and clothe yourself in a manner that the only fitting accessory for would be mint sauce. You make a twat of yourself.

It’s OK; you’ll have earned it.

So at day 7,500 you should still be feeling pretty chipper, eh? Three quarters of your life stretching out in front of you. But today’s youth grow up fast; drinking, smoking weed, class As and underage sex by your mid-teens… The advent of your twenties is starting to feel like the beginning of the end: “I’m twen-teen, twenteen!” I drunkenly cried on my big two-zero birthday party – never wanting to abandon the unquestionable youth of the teen-suffix. It stood for my God-given right to drop out, shirk responsibility, and repeatedly break the law with the impunity of youth.

Illustration by Dave Cardy

But now you’ve stopped growing. You’re no longer becoming something; you are slowly dying. It’s all downhill from here; At least, that’s what all my birthday cards read. But if you think that’s bad, then there’s always your other ‘quarter-life crisis’.

Mortality rates are constantly increasing. We, as a generation, shall outlive our parents: So your twenty-fifth may well be the time for your breakdown…This is the landmark when you realise that it was already five years ago that you made a scene about turning twenty; Fifteen to Twenty had seemed epochal, chasmic - but this gap had been much quicker… And then you suddenly understand comments that old people make about time flying past; Gone are the days when five minutes seemed like an eternity as you were forced to sit on your Gran’s couch to ‘let your dinner go down’, before you were permitted to go and play cricket with your friends. Time now moves quick and unnoticed like a snake in the grass. Years suddenly become a wholly faster affair and you finally understand that the older you get, time mockingly increases it’s pace.

Your life will flash before your eyes and you’ll realise that you never tried smack, or had a threesome, foursome, group orgy; you wasted years on the wrong partners; you wanted to be a fireman, artist, card sharp, stripper. But, as the anthropomorphic tongue of Death moistens it’s thumb and mid-digit with spittle and snuffs your metaphorical candle flame – you become fertilizer.

That’s what it’s like to turn twenty-five.

It is of course trite to point out that you start to find clubs too loud for conversation, and you wish groups of eighteen year olds wouldn’t sing along to the Goddamned jukebox in pubs. You start to find emo clothing too androgynous even though you spent your teens wearing an evening gown and tiara (despite being a hetero-male) – and besides, what’s rock ’n’ roll about constantly fussing over your neat, black comb-over?

I really needn’t go on to state that, obviously, you don’t know why anyone would want to listen to some chavver’s lyrical take on romance on Myspace, despite personally supporting a DIY anti-establishment approach to the music industry; The problem with democracy being that most people are idiots, right? …They say you get more right wing as you get older.

You will, naturally, have no idea why anyone would want to recycle those ‘Frankie Says’ style t-shirts that you remember your uncle having when you were an infant. Why would you want to dress like Ferris Bueller, anyway? 1980’s Nikes were still made in sweatshops.

We think, like every generation before us: “We were cool when we were your age – you, clearly, are not.” Yes, these are your twenties, time to enter fruitless long-term relationships, get a six-month-long marriage under your belt, and develop a hitherto absent interest in automobilia and football. Your quarter-life crisis is most likely to manifest itself as the very antithesis of your mid-life one.

There is every chance that you will be a cooler person when you are forty-five than you will at twenty-five.

Michael Powell

Illustration by Gordon Brown

White wine morning.

Morning and all is silent, I am in bed, and it is around 6.
On the Devon coast, along the shoreline, spitting feathers are gathered up by the hands of the crest of each wave, sunlight is appearing in rusted yawns, and slowly opens her eyes, splendid and enchanting, washing the rocks in white wine.

After the shower, comes the corridor, the driveway, the bike and my first tree of the day.

There is a lady made of purple wings and eyes and apple cores, she is sitting upon a leaf, on a branch on a tree, my first tree of today.
It is a silver birch, beautiful in the morning light, and I never want it to leave my sight again.
She is overlooking the morning rising.
She is suggestive in her eyebrows, her mouth swirls rouge pate in correlation with her twitching wings and lips.
The street below is full of almost twenty people avoiding the other zombies and things. No one it seems has noticed her, except for me. I have been staring at her for too long. I become anxious about time and clocks. I jump on my bike and pedal.

I ignore the cars and stop despite their beeps.

On the cycle ride to work I pass a man, stuck, head deep in a thorn bush,
‘Are you ok?’ I ask him, my tone concerned,
‘Of course I am’ he shouts back, ‘are you ok?’
This question stops me, like a squirrel stops a falling nut or branch or bird, dead in the air, between its cunning teeth.
My feet hit the floor.
I am standing on the pavement, my bike between my legs.
The man, I look back at him, he is still in the bush, but seems to be ignoring me now.
I turn my head to the sky; it is blue and full of lethargy and clouds.
I ride on, a little disturbed.

9 am is such a wonderful day.

For the first hour, the shop sits silent, despite the hundreds of eyes and feet that swarm the newspapers and coffee machines, I am ignoring them all, it is far too early. Instead I doodle tired eyes behind the till.
However, over by the lifestyle section, something catches my eye, a rainbow has just this moment formed, flowering from the ears of a passing customer. I stand stern, attempting to ignore the floral brigade of colour, which grows in voice from his ears, and marches across my eyelids, increasing in volume and great song.
He has noticed me looking at him, I have failed in my casual gawping, he seems intrigued by me, but at the same time, it appears he is oblivious to the rainbow air flowering from his ears.
He approaches me, and there is fire within him, it turns loudly in his face.
I attempt to explain about the rainbow, but as I try, his face turns into a red plum red cloud, which rises above the both of us. I point at it half in admiration, half in fear, ‘you can’t do that’ I yell, ‘first rainbows now clouds, you are causing a scene!’
He seems confused by this remark. It has become clear to me that he does not believe in rainbows,
This saddens me, so I turn my back on him, and with this, he takes the hint and walks toward the exit.
As he leaves the shop, the most amazing thing happens, and for a moment the whole of the shop floor turns into a deep sea mist of cloud and rainbow. There are waves and whales and penguins and silhouettes and circles everywhere. I remain starched behind the till, like the tall white duke of books that I am, in complete awe. Then as quickly as it rose, this scene dissolves back into the early morning. Outside the shop I can hear the caffeine rain hitting the pavement and hats outside.

He makes model boats and takes pictures of them, so they look like real boats.

I place a book inside a bag inside a book inside a bag. I am serving. I attempt to hold its hand, it reels back a step, and pulls its phone from its pocket for protection or comfort or perhaps just to look at the jazzy colours and stars on its cover. What is certain is that is it does not want to touch me. I look at it, but it will not look at me. It gives me some money, I add it to the till, which beeps and groans with delight. It departs with its book inside a bag inside a book inside a bag in hand, hands that would not even look at me. Another now approaches, it has ginger hair and a moustache, I scramble in my pockets for my phone.

And the sun is the moon, and I am the moon, in the night, watching from the blackness of sleep.

I am in the toilet, the disabled one near the café shop; it is my favorite one. I have been here for twenty minutes now, and will be here for another ten at least. It is piss bleached white and very bright. I am thinking of the Moleman. I saw him earlier today. He is much more interesting than the man who is a woman who is a man, and reeks of old perfume and sausages and oil, she is just rude. Moleman talks about himself in the third person, he goes space stalking on weekends, and is also haunted by monkeys. He is my favorite of the queue. Someone has just knocked on the door, I am going to have to stop talking now, I don’t want them to hear me.

There are five already serving, I am the sixth.

I remove another book from the trolley and place it in its alphabetized shelf space.
Then another,
and another,
and another too.
There is a voice, which echoes across the shop, it demands my assistance. I recognise the voice, it is comforting. I drop the book I am holding and head to the till. The queue is without smiles and long; it has many eyes and haircuts. I serve and wrap and bag and cash for ten minutes, placing books inside bags inside books inside bags, until all the faces and feet have passed, and then return to the book on the floor. I pick the book up, place it in its alphabetized shelf space, then I remove another book from the trolley and placed it in its alphabetized shelf space.
Then another,
and another,
and another too.

The staff room, a neon white light of easy wipe furniture and no eyes.

There are five people sitting.
They are reading and eating,
They are munching and digesting,
They are slurping and picking the debris from the table,
from their mouths and behind each other’s ears.
They have corpses on their tongues.
I am afraid of joining them; I do not want to enter into this world. I quickly step quickly step, and swiftly remove my sandwiches from the fridge. My fingers are warm and scared, the sandwiches are cold. Without a word, I exit this strange place.

A wet sloppy elephant, uninterested and dull.

It is after lunch, same moves, same words, same tired motion. I remove another book from the trolley and place it in its alphabetized shelf space.
Then another,
and another,
and another too.
There is a voice, it echoes across the shop. I recognise the voice, it is comforting. I head to the till. There are five already serving, I am the sixth, the queue is long, and it has many eyes. I serve and wrap and bag and cash for ten minutes, placing books inside bags inside books inside bags, until all the ears and haircuts have passed, and then return to remove another book from the trolley and place it in its alphabetized shelf space.
Then another,
and another,
and another too.

The calendars tell the time and answer all the questions.

I am standing on the top staircase, shielded from the gleaming eyes of vehicles and moons and faces and clothes, by a selection of calendars. A man in a brown jacket walks past, he does not see me. A woman in an orange coat, with fossilised hair, passes by slowly, and I am sure she senses something, though she does not show it. I turn on my foot, to hide a little deeper, creeping into the cavernous candy of multiple days. A woman with a perm and ears approaches from the rear. She has seen me. She asks me a question. As she speaks, a thousand voices grow from her lips, some shouting, some howling, some complimentary. I simply nod, and stare at the calendars. I dare not to move, this woman scares me with her questions. She stands watching my face, waiting for something to happen, then realising that this is all that will ever happen, she leaves.

In the Bubble.

I remove another book from the trolley and place it in its alphabetized shelf space.
Then another,
and another,
and another too.
The room is now a stream of pink light and grey ice. I am secretly sitting upon a giant hand, overlooking some children and animals waving flags.

Yesterday, I quit my job.

I am surrounded by hundreds of faces, plastic books and haircuts. Yet no one acknowledges me except to give me money in exchange for something they want. There is a man with no trousers on inside the shop; next to him stands a Po-faced monster on stilts beneath a sultana sun. The man is shouting stories of wooden sheds and soft petal tears, as a smile cracks on his face. He is smiling because the monster has just mushroom floated off his stilts, landed on the floor and discovered his first glass flower. His voice sounds familiar; it is warm and yellow hearted. All the books have fallen from their alphabetized spaces. It is my voice. Outside I can see the clouds forming tulips and soft faces with the blue sky, I shall go there.